ARMM

[acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal
Moderation'] A Usenet cancelbot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls,
Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from
anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for
anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated
control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming
ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke
loose on the night of March 31, 1993 and proceeded to spamnews.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200
messages.

ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which
mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other
headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which
each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject
line got longer and longer and longer.

Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological
messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying
line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM
debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing the term
despew), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary
example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and
incompetence can wreak on a network. Compare Great Worm;
sorcerer's apprentice mode. See also software laser,
network meltdown.